Medical devices such as patient monitors typically make available medically relevant information to healthcare professionals. Such information may be about a state of the patient, a state of the medical device, etc. The information may serve to alert the user to said state, and may take various forms. For example, if a patient monitor determines the state of a patient is deteriorating, e.g., by a heart rate of the patient being irregular, the patient monitor may generate an alert by displaying a warning, sounding an alarm, etc. The healthcare professional is thus informed to attend the patient, check on the patient monitor, etc.
Various systems are known for providing such medical information to a mobile device of a healthcare professional to ensure communication of the information to the healthcare professional. For example, a product titled mVisum Alert Management System is said to have the following functionality, according to a webpage consulted on Apr. 2, 2013 at the web-address http://www.mvisum.com/mvisumalert.php. An alarm is generated by a patient monitor or telemetry device and sent to the mVisum Server which then push delivers it to the mobile device. mVisum Alert application on the mobile device receives the alarm data and sounds a unique audible ringtone that corresponds to the criticality of the alarm. The alarm details, color coded by alarm severity, are displayed on the handheld device. Additional data displayed include a scrollable waveform showing the alarm event.
US 2008/0154513 A1 describes an enhancement of existing home blood glucose (BG) monitoring devices by introducing an intelligent data interpretation component capable of predicting and alerting the user to periods of increased risk for hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia, increased glucose variability, and ineffective testing. For that purpose, self-monitored (SM) BG measurements are evaluated and warnings for the next time period are issued. Such warnings may take the form of messages such as “Your blood sugar is typically low before lunch”. US 2008/0154513 A1 is thus from the field of home monitoring devices.
Disadvantageously, the abovementioned mVisum system does not address the following situation. When a patient is admitted to hospital and family, friends or other non-professional caretakers are staying with the patient, such as in the case when parents are staying with their baby in a neonatal ward, the number of medical devices which monitor and provide care services for the patient can often be overwhelming for such non-professional caretakers. This situation is exacerbated when these medical devices begin to generate alerts, e.g., by sounding audible alarms or displaying various information onscreen. Non-professional caretakers are often unaware of what is happening and do not know what to do, thereby giving rise to anxiety and/or stress. Further exacerbating the situation is the fact that healthcare professionals such as nurses and doctors may rush over to attend to the patient for one type of alarm but not for another type of alarm. Yet another cause of anxiety and/or stress may be that, in some hospitals, the name of the patient may be suddenly displayed on a hospital screen without the non-professional caretaker knowing why.